Paradox, BBC One, review

Here’s a useful tip for you. The next time you have trouble getting the police to come round and investigate a crime, simply ring the station and explain that you’re a top scientist and that you want to see “a clever police officer” at once.

Certainly, this worked a treat for Dr Christian King (Emun Elliott) in the first episode of BBC One’s Paradox. Barely had he put the phone down than DI Rebecca Flint (Tamzin Outhwaite) arrived at his laboratory. She didn’t waste any time, either, demonstrating the requisite cleverness. King showed her several satellite photographs that he’d downloaded of a blown-up railway bridge. “It looks,” she said thoughtfully, “as though there’s been an explosion.”

There was, however, a twist – one that might have been mildly familiar to anybody who’s seen Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report. According to the time code on the photos, the explosion wouldn’t happen until 8.33pm that evening, 10 hours later. Weirder still, having called in the police so urgently, Dr King now refused to be drawn further, or indeed to help in any way whatsoever. Instead, he just stared moodily into the middle distance, pausing only to sneer at Flint’s admittedly hopeless attempts to understand what was going on. In her defence, mind you, the explanation wasn’t that obvious. A solar storm had caused some sort of slippage in time, enabling King to see (very slightly) into the future.

In short, Paradox entirely failed to solve the problem posed by this kind of high-concept show. On the one hand, Flint had no reason to accept that King’s prediction really would come true – or even that it really was a prediction. On the other, if she didn’t, there’d be no programme. Unwisely, the script opted to thrash about between the two positions – and far too much time passed with her unconvincingly pretending not to believe in the impending catastrophe while also haring about Manchester trying to prevent it.

If this were an American series, my guess is that it would have started by simply taking the premise for granted and getting on with it: Dr King could see (very slightly) into the future and DI Flint’s job was to find the clues and save the day. The “scientific” explanation would then have been filled in several weeks later. As things stood, the biggest mystery last night was how such an opening episode could have gone through all the many meetings required for a prime-time BBC One slot without anybody ever saying, “Hold on a minute, nobody’s behaviour here makes any sense.”

In fact, the climactic scenes were quite exciting – thanks largely to the ever-reliable device of an on-screen clock ticking down to the disaster.Sadly, by then the show’s complete absence of internal logic (or, if you prefer, its overwhelming silliness) meant that it was beyond help.

Of course, now that the premise has been put so laboriously in place, Paradox may perk up a bit in the coming weeks. None the less, at this stage, Channel 4’s Cast Offs (whose second episode is on tonight) looks much more promising. In theory, a comedy-drama about disabled people, with a disabled cast and two disabled writers, might imply something well-meaning but ultimately too pious. In practice, this one perhaps overestimates the shock value of disabled people being interested in sex – but otherwise goes about its business with an impressive lack of self-consciousness.

It even manages to rise above the clichéd framework of a fictional reality show: in this case one where Channel 4 has sent the characters to a remote island “to prove differently abled people can achieve self-sufficiency”. The supposed show itself is neatly interwoven with flashbacks to the participants’ lives in the months beforehand, creating an effect not unlike a plucky British version of Lost. The flashbacks duly illuminate the characters’ island behaviour, but with a cast of only six, and a series budget that would fund about three minutes of the average American drama.

In each episode too, the flashbacks will focus Lost-style on a different character. Last night it was the turn of Dan (Peter Mitchell), a young bloke from Northern Ireland recently paralysed from the waist down in a car crash. As we watched him building his new life, the strongest and certainly the most original sections concerned the clumsy attempts of his loving parents to put on a brave face. There was even the dark (and very courageous) suggestion that at some deep-buried level they were almost pleased that his disability meant he needed them again – just as he had when he was still their little boy.